Pseudoscience can kill, but it causes even greater harm when it corrupts institutions

One can continue to gauge Italians’ scientific literacy by asking how many believe in homeopathy, horoscopes, chemtrails or some other baseless theory, thereby obtaining certainly interesting insights into the population’s level of scientific literacy – provided one does not lose sight of a far more serious phenomenon: in Italy, pseudoscience permeates universities, public administrations, professional bodies, the courts and Parliament with remarkable ease, managing to secure from institutions governed by educated people a measure of legitimacy that it cannot achieve through evidence. When this happens, individual ignorance explains less and less of the problem, because the citizen whom we ask to distinguish science from its imitation encounters professors who teach pseudoscientific disciplines, professionals who earn credits by attending such courses, judges who accept their conclusions through expert reports, and legislators who debate their recognition; the confusion we observe downstream has been at least partly generated upstream.

Biodynamic agriculture provides a particularly clear example because it takes us beyond the realm of medicine, where illness and the need for treatment make the search for unfounded solutions easier to understand. Biodynamics stems from the lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in 1924 and retains practices that incorporate cosmic influences, preparations made by filling cattle horns with manure, and other procedures linked to its author’s anthroposophical conception; Nevertheless, in May 2021, the Senate debated a bill on organic farming in which biodynamics was explicitly mentioned, and Elena Cattaneo, a life senator and pharmacologist, had to table an amendment to remove that reference, which the Senate rejected. In the final text approved in 2022, the term was removed, whilst a general provision remained allowing methods that comply with European and national legislation to be treated as equivalent to organic farming. 

In January 2023, the 37th International Congress of the Association for Biodynamic Agriculture was held in the Adalberto Libera Aula Magna at Roma Tre University, under the patronage of, amongst others, the Ministry of the Environment, the Lazio Region and Roma Capitale; the programme featured speakers from academia and public institutions, as well as a keynote lecture on ‘Biodynamic identity, economics and social threefolding’, whilst the pre-conference sessions included presentations on biodynamic agriculture and anthroposophical medicine as ‘two daughters of Anthroposophy’ and on the role of intuition in scientific knowledge. Steiner’s theory did not need to change in order to attain a different social status, for it was sufficient simply to change the setting in which it was presented: within a university lecture theatre, amongst lecturers and representatives of public institutions, what outside that setting would first and foremost have required proof of its validity could now begin to draw on the very presence of the university as a mark of respectability. 

In October 2025, the mechanism reappeared in such an extreme form that it seemed to have been deliberately constructed to make it visible, when, on the initiative of Gian Marco Centinaio, Vice-President of the Senate for the Lega party, a conference was held in the Senate’s Nassirya Fallen Soldiers’ Hall dedicated to the so-called ‘Majorana Machine’, the device which, according to supporters of Rolando Pelizza, was allegedly designed in secret by Ettore Majorana and is said to be capable, amongst other things, of producing unlimited energy, annihilating matter, transforming common materials into gold and even rejuvenating living beings – without any of these claims ever having been subjected to independent experimental verification. The following January, Elena Cattaneo organised a CICAP conference in the same Senate entitled "La macchina di Majorana, una storia senza prove", specifically to reconstruct the events and clarify that the photographs, letters and videos presented by the supporters are no substitute for a verifiable experiment. 

This affair is almost a practical demonstration of the transfer of credibility that occurs when an institution lends its premises and its symbols. A member of the public does not have the means to personally verify particle physics, just as they cannot replicate a clinical trial before taking a medicine, and so they rely on reasonable indicators of reliability to guide them: a university, a research body, a ministry, Parliament. When a story about the transmutation of matter is brought before the Senate by an institutional body, that story inevitably gains something which its supporters can present to the outside world as endorsement, even when the accompanying statements make it clear that the Senate is not responsible for the opinions expressed.

Rino Liuzzi himself, known by his stage name ‘Jupiter’ and who works as an astrologer, chaired a conference organised by the Italian League for the Fight against Cancer (LILT) on 5 December 2024 at the Ministry of Health’s auditorium, dedicated to the current state of affairs and future prospects of the LILT; A month later, on 4 January 2025, he was invited onto Rai Radio 1’s programme “Caffè Europa”, whilst the future of space exploration was being discussed on the occasion of the European Space Agency’s fiftieth anniversary. The stars do not become capable of predicting events simply because an astrologer steps into a ministry or appears on a public service programme; rather, it becomes much more difficult to distinguish the astrologer from an expert when two institutions – which the public regards as gatekeepers of expertise – include him in their programmes. 

The university has an even more powerful impact, because here qualifications take the form of credits and degrees. In the 2025–2026 academic year, the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery at the University of Rome Tor Vergata continues to offer a one-year first-level master’s degree in ‘Natural Medicine and Naturopathic Sciences’, worth 60 credits, explicitly presented as a professional development opportunity; the programmes and course prospectuses associated with this course have included homeopathy, homotoxicology, Bach flower remedies and other disciplines of vastly differing scientific rigour. Studying homeopathy at university would be perfectly reasonable if it were treated as a subject within the history of medicine, sociology or critical analysis; however, a vocational Master’s programme housed within a Faculty of Medicine sends a different message, as it teaches students to use these practices and, as a result, awards university credits for them. 

The same ambiguity is inherent in the continuing professional development system for healthcare professionals. In 2017, the National Commission for Continuing Professional Development ruled that events dedicated to non-conventional medicine may only be accredited if they present technical and scientific content based on proof of efficacy and evidence-based medicine; however, it explicitly included homeopathic medicine, homotoxicology, traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine and anthroposophic medicine, as well as practices that raise different scientific issues such as phytotherapy and acupuncture. The clause on evidence-based medicine should resolve the contradiction, provided that the actual accreditation distinguishes between a course that teaches how to critically evaluate homeopathy and one that trains participants in prescribing homeopathic remedies; otherwise, what remains is primarily the visible administrative outcome, namely an activity that produces the same CME credits with which doctors certify their professional development.

Tuscany has turned this ambiguity into a structural health policy, stating on its official website that acupuncture, traditional Chinese medicine, homeopathy, phytotherapy and manual medicine “form part of the treatments covered by the regional health system”; as recently as April 2026, the Region listed four centres of excellence for complementary medicine, including a Homeopathy Clinic run by the North-West Tuscany Local Health Authority, and in the following May published issue 60 of its ‘Regional Bulletin on Complementary Medicine’, which featured, amongst other things, an article on the twenty years of experience of the homeopathic centre in Lucca.

The administrative category chosen by the Regional Authority downplays differences that are scientifically decisive, because phytotherapy involves pharmacologically active substances that can be studied using standard pharmacological methods, whilst homeopathy is based on the law of similars and on preparations obtained through dilutions and ‘potentisation’ – which the Region’s own page describes without clarifying to the reader the gap between this system and contemporary knowledge of chemistry and pharmacology. Members of the public find this description on the very same portal where they search for hospitals, healthcare provisions and services, with the result that the distinction between acknowledging the existence of a practice and attributing therapeutic legitimacy to it becomes increasingly difficult to discern. 

Bill S.1251, tabled by Senator Orfeo Mazzella of the Five Star Movement and still under consideration by the Senate, introduces this confusion directly into the wording of the legislation, as it refers to "pluralism in science", declares that it recognises the “therapeutic value of complementary and integrative therapies” and provides for these to be included within the services provided by the National Health Service, whilst subsequent articles regulate committees, professional registers and training courses. The therapeutic value of a practice falls within the category of empirical propositions, as it must be demonstrated by measuring a benefit against appropriate controls; Parliament may decide which services to fund and how to organise them, whilst a majority vote adds no data to that produced by clinical trials. 

In addition to the academic, administrative and political dimensions of credibility, there is a particularly insidious one, as it stems from the authority of the court and the role that scientific expertise plays in the proceedings. The judge must also rule on matters where the solution depends on knowledge they do not personally possess, and so they rely on technical consultants; if the expert report poorly selects the literature, confuses a temporal sequence with a causal relationship, or attaches disproportionate weight to minority studies, the scientific error may find its way into the judgement and immediately acquire a new authority. From that moment on, the process can become self-perpetuating, because the judgement is cited outside the courtroom as proof that a court has ‘recognised’ that link; this supposed proof reinforces the public credibility of the experts who had supported it, and the precedent may fuel new cases in which similar expert reports are presented.

In 2012, the Rimini Labour Court recognised a causal link between the MMR vaccination and autism in a child and ordered the Ministry of Health to pay the compensation provided for by law; In 2015, the Bologna Court of Appeal overturned the decision following a new expert report, deeming the studies used to support the link to be scientifically irrelevant; these included research by Andrew Wakefield, whose article on the link between the MMR vaccine and autism had already been retracted and whose scientific conduct had been judged to be seriously flawed. Meanwhile, the Rimini ruling had attracted considerable attention in the media and within anti-vaccine circles, because the claim that ‘a court has ruled that the vaccine causes autism’ carries far greater communicative weight than an epidemiological review explaining why no such link exists.

The same pattern has re-emerged with mobile phones. In 2017, the Court of Ivrea recognised an acoustic nerve neurinoma suffered by a Telecom employee who had made extensive use of a mobile phone for work purposes as an occupational disease, and in January 2020 the Turin Court of Appeal upheld the decision, arguing that there was a ‘scientific law of coverage’ capable of supporting the causal link; During the same period, a report on radio frequencies and cancer produced by the Italian National Institute of Health in collaboration with other scientific bodies presented a review of the evidence which did not confirm an increase in brain tumours attributable to mobile phone use, consistent with the findings of the large-scale Interphone study.

The issue here does not concern a worker’s right to claim compensation – which must be determined in accordance with the rules governing social security proceedings – but rather the transfer of a judicial conclusion from the realm of law to that of science. Civil proceedings may use evidential and causal criteria designed to resolve a dispute between specific parties; epidemiology, on the other hand, seeks to establish whether an exposure actually alters the risk within a population, through studies that must control for confounding factors, systematic errors and random fluctuations. When an individual court ruling is transformed into the statement ‘the courts have proven that mobile phones cause cancer’, two distinct systems of evaluation are conflated, and the authority of the judiciary ends up superseding that of scientific evidence.

The Xylella affair demonstrates just how destructive this cycle can become, even outside the field of medicine. In December 2015, the Lecce Public Prosecutor’s Office ordered the preventive seizure of the olive trees affected by the bacterium containment plan and entered ten people in the register of suspects, including researchers from the CNR, university lecturers and the special commissioner Giuseppe Silletti; the measure effectively halted the eradication operations provided for in the plan, whilst the prosecution’s case also called into question the scientific assumptions attributing a central role to Xylella fastidiosa in the dieback. In 2019, the investigation was closed with regard to the charges of spreading the disease, and in February 2026 the investigating magistrate in Bari also dismissed the final proceedings against the former head of the CNR, Donato Boscia, recognising that he had acted in accordance with European and national legislation. In the meantime, the disease had continued to spread throughout the region.

A judicial investigation inevitably possesses a power that a scientific article does not: it can seize materials, halt an activity, question people and turn a scientist into a suspect. Precisely for this reason, the entry of a scientifically weak reconstruction into the judicial system has consequences that exceed those of any pseudoscientific conference, because the error becomes capable of materially altering the reality on which it purports to pass judgement. If containment measures are halted during a plant epidemic, the time lost is not made up once the investigation is closed; if a researcher is portrayed for years as a possible culprit in the spread of the disease they are studying, a final acquittal does not automatically restore the public trust that has been lost.

Stamina took the relationship between the courts, politics and pseudoscience a step further. From 2012 onwards, several judges ordered the Spedali Civili hospital in Brescia to continue or administer the infusions requested by patients, whilst AIFA had already contested fundamental aspects of the production and characterisation of the cells; in 2013, Parliament intervened, allowing certain treatments to continue and paving the way for a publicly funded clinical trial. A procedure that had failed to produce the evidence normally required for an advanced therapy thus managed, in succession, to secure the endorsement of a public hospital, that of numerous court orders and, finally, that of the law; each of these was used to make it more difficult to return to the original question of what evidence actually existed.

This mechanism can be termed ‘epistemic recycling’, because a credential obtained for administrative, professional, judicial or political reasons is reintroduced into the debate as if it were scientific evidence. The registration of a product is cited as recognition of its efficacy; a master’s degree as academic recognition of the discipline it teaches; a court ruling as proof of causality; and a seat in Parliament as evidence that a theory at least deserves to be considered on a par with others. After a few such steps, the pseudoscientific practice has amassed a sufficiently substantial institutional track record to be used against those who still demand the data. The power of this procedure lies in the fact that every single act may be perfectly legitimate within its own scope, whilst the sum of these acts produces a result that no one seems to have formally decided upon.

The high level of education among those involved offers far less protection than we tend to assume, since a thorough knowledge of a discipline requires different skills from those needed to recognise a pseudoscientific construct when it has learnt to mimic the social structure of science. A doctor may be an excellent clinician yet be unable to properly assess literature that has been selected in a biased manner; a judge may apply the law impeccably yet rely entirely on their own adviser when it comes to understanding an epidemiological report; a professor may defend the presence of a baseless theory at their university by invoking academic freedom, without distinguishing between the freedom to study it and the credibility conferred by teaching it professionally. The fragmentation of responsibilities allows each person to deal correctly with their own part, whilst no one is any longer accountable for the epistemic quality of the final result.

Sometimes the consequences of this confusion are irreversible in the simplest sense of the word. Francesco Bonifazi was seven years old when, in May 2017, he died after a bacterial ear infection had been treated for days using only homeopathic remedies; the doctor, Massimiliano Mecozzi, was convicted of manslaughter at first instance and on appeal, and in January 2025 the Court of Cassation upheld the three-year sentence. In this case, homeopathy is neither an epistemological curiosity nor a matter of cultural freedom, because the replacement of an effective treatment with a pseudo-treatment led to the deterioration of a treatable illness, ultimately resulting in encephalitis and death. 

Misinformation about vaccines causes harm through a dynamic that is less easily attributable to individual propagandists but is observable at a population level: in the two-year period 2017–2018, Italy recorded 8,078 cases of measles and thirteen deaths, whilst the Italian National Institute of Health identified low vaccination coverage, which had built up over the years, as the main cause of the two epidemic waves; Almost 89 per cent of cases with a known vaccination status involved unvaccinated individuals. A ruling that erroneously attributes autism to the MMR vaccine inevitably enters the very same information environment in which families must decide whether to vaccinate, and its subsequent scientific refutation has far less capacity to circulate than the initial news story.

Death is the most immediately recognisable consequence of pseudoscience, whilst the wider damage begins when its practices infiltrate the institutions that a society relies on to determine which information is trustworthy. No individual citizen can personally verify the safety of a bridge, replicate a drug trial or sequence the genome of a bacterium before accepting a diagnosis; a complex society functions because it distributes knowledge and establishes institutions to which it entrusts the task of verifying it. If universities, public authorities, courts and Parliament cease to distinguish consistently enough between the social existence of a belief and its scientific validity, it is precisely this system of delegated trust that is compromised.

The consequence directly affects democracy, because a democracy can only withstand the conflict between interests and values as long as there remains sufficient common ground on which to establish what has happened and what the foreseeable effects of different decisions are. It is possible to discuss democratically whether to fund an effective treatment, how much to spend on controlling a plant disease, or what level of industrial risk to consider acceptable; but if the relationship between treatment and efficacy, between bacteria and disease, or between exposure and cancer becomes, in turn, a matter to be determined by parliamentary majorities, court rulings or political affiliations, the conflict ceases to concern what we wish to make of reality and begins to concern which reality each group has the right to proclaim.

For this reason, it would be extremely dangerous to respond by turning bad science into a criminal offence or by entrusting the state with the task of certifying which theories are scientifically correct. The opposite risk is already evident in the United States, where Donald Trump, the Republican president, signed Executive Order 14303, ‘Restoring Gold Standard Science’, in May 2025, requiring federal agencies to align their scientific activities with criteria defined by the executive; many of the principles listed in the text, such as reproducibility, transparency, falsifiability and the reporting of uncertainties, are unquestionably part of good scientific practice, whilst the institutionally sensitive aspect lies in conferring upon the political authorities the role of defining and enforcing from above the standard to which the science practised by federal agencies must conform.

Defending against pseudoscience therefore requires something more challenging and less spectacular than a ‘truth police’: universities, professional bodies, public administrations, the judiciary and politicians must take responsibility for the significance of the qualifications they award, whilst maintaining the distinction between the right to advocate any idea and the right to have that idea endorsed by a scientific or public institution. Academic freedom protects the study of homeopathy, but does not oblige a Faculty of Medicine to teach it as a therapy; political pluralism protects those who believe in biodynamics, without equating Steiner’s preparations with experimental agronomy on scientific grounds; access to justice guarantees everyone the right to seek compensation, without turning the court into the forum where it is determined, on behalf of the scientific community, whether a mobile phone causes cancer.

When, in 2023, the University of Catania cancelled an event entitled ‘The Reality of Homeopathy’, scheduled to take place in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, the Vice-Chancellor, Francesco Priolo, did not forbid homeopaths from expressing their beliefs, nor did he decree which theory was true: he simply decided what content his department would endorse under the university’s name.

Pseudoscience can therefore be deadly, as happens when a pseudo-therapy replaces an effective treatment, but it is capable of even greater harm when it slowly poisons institutions, because from that moment on it begins to destroy the mechanism through which millions of people – who are, by necessity, unable to verify every specialist claim for themselves – decide whom to trust. If a citizen encounters biodynamics in universities and legislation, homeopathy in postgraduate courses and the National Health Service, a machine capable of producing gold in the chambers of the Senate, and a scientifically unfounded causal link within a court judgement, their difficulty in distinguishing between science and pseudoscience can no longer be explained solely by their ignorance. We have taught them that institutional credibility and the quality of evidence can be separated, and when this lesson is fully learnt, it is not just trust in science that is lost: the ability to distinguish between the authority derived from the verification of facts and that derived from the power to pronounce them is also lost. A democracy in which this distinction becomes permanently unclear remains formally capable of voting, legislating and judging, whilst progressively losing the ability to make decisions about reality itself.